Janiney Baneeny`s Fotolog

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I have not been blogging for many reasons. One major reason involves a return to the trepidation and gross feeling towards blogging that I initially battled with, and overcame, as discussed in my very first blog (please see December 2005).

As many of you know, I spend a lot of time, ‘in my head’. But change has been ‘a brewin’ for the last 6 or so months….and this is quite so anymore. Don’t get me wrong, I will always be an overly thoughtful and thought-concerned person, but the degree and concern to which I do or care to spend time in this state has seriously declined.

I am not quite sure as to why. Perhaps my roommate can contest to the fact that she now hears a lot of it instead; she currently seems to have reached a state of trust in my life that she has a ‘front and center’ view of my thought processes, no matter how absurd.

But this is not it either. I share my absurd thoughts with Sharon, but not the overly pensive and even theoretical and ‘heady’ ones. When these start to pop into my head, I’ve now started to ignore them, because they simply take up too much energy and time. Frankly, I just don’t seem to care anymore about those ‘big questions’. It is from this kind of thought that my blogs often arise, even if they are about ridiculous stories from my past - I prefer to weave some kind of encompassing theme throughout even the silliest of stories to bring all the pieces together at the end. This is my favourite way to write, and it simply seems to have ceased happening (or at least I have lost the motivation to make it happen).

It is my last semester of University. In this past fall semester I felt like I was always close to drowning, rather than confidently treading the academic waters as I had learned to do in my past 4 years of school. I look at this coming semester as probably my most challenging. And the worst part of all...I have two 930am classes. Again, for those of you who know me, I am not a morning person. Last semester I, quite contently, did the bulk of my work between the hours of 11pm and 4am. How am I possibly going to make it? In my second week of classes I have already stretched my wake time from 730 until 8am…I have little room left to move as I must leave by 830 at the latest. I was already late for both of them this week (yet it is fair to blame transit and weather for both...)

My two 9:30 classes are very ‘heady’ indeed. One is ‘the evolution of morality’ and the other is ‘Self, Psychology, and Education’. Both of the instructors for these classes are experts in their fields who have worked with and personally know all those people you read about in your first year courses (those who are still alive anyway). They tell you things like, “this concept is almost impossible to understand”, and then the man who did all of his graduate work at Harvard, then taught and Cambridge gives you 2 weeks to do your first readings at least three times over because he "found them very difficult”.

They are seminar classes in which we spend the entire time as a group discussing, debating, and contemplating these issues at every level, then study the history and development of these questions and theories throughout the history of thinking man (and woman, of course). This morning, while we contemplated what exactly ‘the self’ is, and what it was to Locke, Hume, Mead, Descartes, and so on, I realized – "this is what I always thought University would be."

I have reached a level now, completing my fifth year of schooling, where the teacher (the epitome of an ‘academic’ in every way imaginable) mentions various names and concepts off handedly, and I actually know what, and who he’s talking about, and I am able to link all the concepts because of it. And then I think, "what a shame that I just don’t care anymore."

Don’t get me wrong: I will succeed, contribute, compete, etc, as I do in these classes, but that same sense of accomplishment and glee that I used to derive from academics and success and pure learning is no longer there. I am burnt out and the rat race and pressures of school, and getting into school again later, have in turn, ruined it for me.

There is no question that ‘overly-thinking-Janine’ will return again at any time. Perhaps these classes will even [forcefully] lead to her return. Until then, here’s what I’m thinking about: I got the greatest pair of polka-dot rain boots and I can’t wait to brave the snow, slush, rain, and ‘muck’ (as my granny would say) without ending up in soaking shoes and pants.

Good-day.

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